by T. M. Logan
I raised the dagger. This was where the madness was going to stop. Right here, right now. I would do what I had to do to protect what was mine.
The footsteps were in the study, calm and even, just a few feet away …
A figure appeared in the doorway.
78
“Hello, Joe,” my wife said.
Mel.
I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Indicating the weapon gripped in my right hand, she said, “You’re not going to stab me with that, are you?”
I lowered the piece of broken mirror, still staring at her. Everything coming together, all at once. Here is my wife. Not Alex Kolnik. Not Ben. My wife.
Mel held her hands up, to demonstrate she wasn’t armed. There was no weapon, just a cell phone. A white iPhone I’d never seen before.
“You,” I said at last.
“Me,” she said, lowering her hands.
I took a step toward her.
Beth’s voice from behind me. “Don’t go any closer, Joe.”
I turned and saw that she had come out from behind the bed and was on her feet. All the fear had gone from her face. She wasn’t wide-eyed or near to tears now. Instead, she looked energized, jubilant, like the female lead about to take a bow at the end of a show. She was pointing a shotgun at me. The gun was long and black, its two barrels like twin black holes sucking all the light from the room.
“Drop the broken glass.” She thumbed back the hammers on the shotgun with a loud click-clack. She looked thoroughly at ease with the weapon, as if she was used to handling it.
I dropped the broken piece of mirror at my feet and noticed, for the first time, how different Beth looked today. Calm and in control. I remembered, with a sudden clarity, what she had studied at college. Another piece of the jigsaw slotting into place.
“Your phone,” she said. “Put it on the dressing table.”
I did as I was told.
“Sit down in the chair,” she said, gesturing with the gun toward an armchair by the side of the dressing table. “Put your hands on the arms of the chair.”
The barrels of the shotgun followed me as I sat down.
Mel picked up my phone and switched it off, then slipped the back off it and took the battery out, putting it into her pocket. She went to stand next to Beth, giving her a handful of pink shotgun cartridges before kissing her on the cheek.
I stared at them. Knowing, finally.
I’d gotten so spun around these last eight days, it had taken me all that time to work out the truth. To arrive at the only conclusion that made sense. But I still didn’t want to believe the evidence of my own eyes.
“You and her,” I said to Mel. “The two of you, all this time?”
She nodded, a tiny movement. “All this time.”
79
Icy sweat traced a line down my rib cage.
I was the rat, and this was the trap. I had followed the bait, all the way in, and now the trap was about to close.
Beth said, “Do you know what misdirection is, Joe?”
“It’s what a magician does.”
“Exactly. The magician’s flourish with his right hand—while his left hand is flipping open the secret compartment. Misdirection. You keep the audience looking at the wrong thing. We made sure you kept looking in the wrong place while we stacked the deck against you, and we made sure the police kept looking in the wrong place too: looking at you. We pushed your buttons and off you went, swallowing everything we sent your way. Everything.”
I stared at them. Too many questions.
“The Facebook posts,” I said, “the texts, the message on my computer screen. It was all you?”
“Both of us,” my wife said.
Beth said, “It turns out that misdirection and improvisation will take you a long way in today’s world. People put their trust in the strangest things—things they can’t actually see with their own eyes—and then refuse to believe what’s right in front of them.”
“But I spoke to him on the phone,” I said, thinking back to Sunday. “I heard his voice.”
“You heard a recording of his voice,” Beth said. “He used to record all his business calls at home and keep them on memory sticks. I just had to find a few of the right phrases to edit a little fifteen-second sequence together—got the idea from one of those recorded marketing calls where you think you’re speaking to a real person before you realize it’s a tape.”
I shook my head, amazed at my own stupidity. I’d even seen those memory sticks myself, in Ben’s desk drawer.
“You handed us the situation,” Beth continued, “and we improvised like a couple of Oscar winners. We had our share of luck as well, but improv is like anything else, really—the more you do it, the more it comes naturally. And I realized, we’re really good at it.”
“Good at lying,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Not lying,” she said. “Acting.”
“Your degree, at college. You did drama, didn’t you?”
“Well remembered! Ben never let me finish my degree, never let me become an actress. He never let me do what I loved. And he never realized that I had actually been acting for years—acting like the faithful housewife, perfect and calm and satisfied, always happy in hubby’s shadow. But this week has been the performance of a lifetime, don’t you think? And you played along so well without even realizing what you were doing!”
“The stuff about Alex Kolnik,” I said wearily, “what about that?”
“All nonsense. Never seen the man. Ben was going to get a restraining order to keep him at arm’s length anyway.”
“But you rented the black Range Rover to give the story a little bit of color.”
“That was your idea too—you mentioned early on that you saw one at the hotel on Thursday night, and we thought there might be a chance to throw it into the mix. We rented it for a week and kept it in extended parking, then Mel drove it over when I met you at the park yesterday. And it came in handy today as well.”
“What about the deleted email from Ben saying he was ‘going home’? I might never have found it.”
“We knew you would, eventually—you’re a very easy person to read. Although Christ knows it took you bloody long enough to hack Mel’s bogus email account, even though she’d used the most obvious password ever.”
“How did you know I’d found the email?”
“A fairly basic piece of gatekeeper software told us which emails you’d opened. And, of course, you took the bait. You ran away up north just when the police were going to arrest you again. It made you look even guiltier, like you were fleeing the inevitable.”
There had been no messages from Ben in Mel’s email account from before Thursday night. My assumption was that she had deleted anything incriminating that dated back before their liaison at the Premier Inn.
But now I knew the truth: there were no messages before that day. Because there was no relationship with Ben. It had all been a fiction, constructed online, fed by social media and fueled by good old-fashioned suspicion and jealousy.
And I had eaten up every last word.
80
I sat up straighter in the chair, swallowing hard on a dry throat. “You said “was.”
“What?” Beth said.
“Ben was going to get a restraining order.”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I?”
“Past tense,” I said, holding her gaze.
“Click-clock, tick-tock, and finally the penny drops,” she said.
There was silence for a moment as I weighed my next words carefully. “So it was you all along. You did it.”
“Did what, Joe?”
“You killed him.”
“But how do you know it wasn’t you, Joe? My poor darling husband—you hurt him and then you left him; you abandoned him. How do you know you’ve not been walking around as a murderer for the last eight days?”
“Because then there wouldn’t have been a need for any of this.” I gestured at
her, at Mel, at the mess in the bedroom. “All these lies. All this misdirection. I would have gone down for it, and that would have been that. Justice would have taken its course.”
“But instead you handed him to us on a plate. It’s a lot easier to suffocate a man when he’s unconscious, believe me.”
She said it in a matter-of-fact way, as if she were talking about the weather.
“You were there in that underground parking lot when it all kicked off, weren’t you?”
“Yes. Ben had asked to meet with Mel at the hotel, just the two of them. But I didn’t trust him. I wanted to be nearby in case he tried to harm her.”
“You saw Ben and me arguing.”
“I watched it all. Unobserved in the shadows.”
“And that’s when you did it?”
Her face hardened at the memory. “You rushed off in a tearing hurry, and then it was just me and my bastard husband. I got out of my car, praying with all my might that you’d done the job for me. But you hadn’t. So I fetched the blanket from the trunk of my car, thinking I would say I was making him a pillow if anyone drove down the ramp. But no one did.”
“And?”
“I stood over him with the blanket for a minute. Perhaps two. No one else came in. We were all alone. And while I stood there, an idea came to me.” Her eyes were shining with a dark light. “And then I smothered him.”
Silence hung heavily between the three of us for a moment.
“It was really quite easy,” she added.
“You called Mel back,” I said finally, “and the two of you put his body in the trunk of your car.”
“Yes. Then we went for a drive.”
“And then you planted evidence in the trunk of my car,” I said. “Suspicious searches on my phone. Planted my phone at the country park.” I shook my head. “This is so screwed up it’s unbelievable.”
Beth laughed. “It’s completely believable, that’s the whole point! Cuckolded husband takes revenge on wife’s lover—it’s been happening for thousands of years. And the more you acted like nothing had happened to him, the guiltier you appeared to the police.”
“I was the fall guy, all along.”
“And a convincing fall guy needs convincing motivation.”
“The pictures on that cell phone, the naked selfies of Mel—what about them?”
My wife said, “A very busy Saturday morning while you were out doing pools and parties with Wills.”
I knew the answer to my next question, but I had to ask it anyway. “So there was never any affair between you and Ben?”
“He’s not her type,” Beth cut in. “She told you that on Sunday.”
I was silent for a moment, trying to take it all in. Trying to make sense of my emotions. Disbelief. Anger.
Heartbreak.
“How could you do this?” I said to Mel quietly.
She said nothing.
“We didn’t have any choice,” Beth answered for her.
It was clear that she was in charge. She was the alpha female, and Mel, my confident, outgoing wife, was the beta. Just like her mum, Mel had ended up in thrall to a dominant, controlling personality, pulled along in her slipstream. Beth was calling the shots—serene Beth, the shy other half who had always seemed to be in Ben’s shadow. Not anymore. Now she was the boss. Maybe for the first time in her life.
“I was asking my wife,” I said.
Mel looked away from me.
“Mel?” I said again.
“We have to protect what we’ve got,” she said, looking at the floor.
“And what’s that?”
“Each other.”
“And that’s worth committing murder for, is it?”
Beth cut in, her voice hard. “Absolutely.”
The last time I had seen them in the same room, one had been screaming obscenities and the other crying. More lies, all for my benefit—and for our friends and dozens of customers who could testify to the ferocity of a hatred between spurned wife and secret lover.
“How long?” I said.
“What?” Beth said.
“You two. How long?”
“Does it matter? What’s important is that we lost each other for too many years, and then we found each other again.”
“You had a fling when you were fifteen, the two of you.”
“You spoke to Mark Ruddington, then.”
“He told me about the party after the school play when you two first got together.” Another piece of evidence that I had held in my hands—and failed to see what it meant. “But that was when you were teenagers. How did you get from that to this?”
“Teenagers are real,” Mel said quietly. “It’s adulthood when we get lost, forget who we are.”
“Come on, Mel, you can do better than that. This is me you’re talking to, your husband. I know who you are.”
“You don’t get it, do you? Teenagers are honest. They’re true—that’s why they feel so vulnerable. It’s easy to forget that with all the other junk that gets in the way as you get older. Work, marriage, kids, mortgage. I woke up one morning and realized I’d turned into someone I didn’t recognize, someone I didn’t even like anymore. And then Beth and I bumped into each other again at Charlotte and Gary’s wedding a couple of years ago, and it all just came back, like being teenagers again.”
“That was the party where you said you made the mistake. A drunken kiss that led to his obsession with you.”
Beth said, “There was a drunken kiss, all right, but not with boring old Ben.”
“That was where the two of you got back together?”
“Like waking up again after twenty years in a coma,” Mel said quietly.
“This is not you, Mel. This isn’t reality.”
“I haven’t forgotten what’s real,” she said. “Who I really am.”
“Then what about our son? What about William? What about me?”
“You pushed us into this corner,” Beth said. “If you’d kept plodding along like you’ve done for the last ten years of your life—good old Joe, head down, stuck in your rut—you needn’t have been involved. But as it is—”
“As it is, you’re framing me for a crime I didn’t commit.”
She jabbed the shotgun toward me.
“That was your choice. You got involved when you didn’t have to, when you stuck your nose in. And then, almost like it was fate, you presented us with an opportunity that was too good to pass up. Gift wrapped and tied with a bow.”
Now the shock was receding, it was starting to become clear: I needed to get out of this house, grab William, and take him somewhere safe. Somewhere far away from these two.
I needed to take the initiative.
“There’s something you should both know.”
“What’s that?”
“DCI Naylor agreed to meet me here,” I lied, checking my watch. “He’s going to be here any minute.”
“You called him from your cell phone?”
“At King’s Cross.”
“No, you didn’t. You texted your lawyer, and then you came straight here.”
“Naylor’s on his way,” I said again, a desperate lie that felt foolish in my mouth.
“No.” Beth shook her head. “And do you know how I know you’re lying? You thought you’d found the little spy inside your cell phone, didn’t you? Thought you’d gotten rid of it and that your phone was safe to use again.”
“The app you installed on my phone. System Track or whatever it’s called.”
“SysAdminTrack,” she corrected me. “Best sixty pounds I ever spent. It’s been on all your phones, by the way: the one you lost at the park, the replacement, and the one you’ve got now.”
“I deleted the app.”
“You thought you deleted it. It stays in the system memory, hidden. The only way to properly get rid of it—if you’re not the one who downloaded it—is to do a full factory reset or get a new phone.”
“You sound like an expert on this stuff.”
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“I installed it on Alice’s phone last year when she started going to the park with boys after school. But I’ve always kept up with Ben’s line of work. He never told me anything about what he did, about the industry that made his fortune—our fortune—so I made sure I kept up to speed. Waiting for the day he asked me to join him in the business.” She frowned. “He never did, of course. Never thought I was worthy.”
“Is that why you killed him?”
She ignored my question. “You didn’t call your detective chief inspector, did you?” Her gaze was cool, unflustered. “You’re a terrible liar, Joe. It puts you at a big disadvantage.”
“I guess I’ll bow to your expertise in that area.”
“On the other hand, you made the perfect patsy—you’re so predictable. Combine that with an app that turns your cell phone into a little tracking, spying device, and we knew exactly what you were doing from one minute to the next. We could switch on the phone’s cameras and microphone remotely without you knowing, record video, audio, take pictures, access your texts and web browser, check your location via GPS, see what you were searching for on Google.”
“Like a hotel in Sunderland.”
“Yes! Or that awful casino. Or train times from King’s Cross, or Fryent Country Park, or my little trail of bread crumbs to lead you to Steven Beecham—even though we couldn’t figure out what the hell you were looking up STEB for at first! But yes, every single search. Sometimes it was like you couldn’t even make a cup of tea without googling exactly how, when, and where you were going to do it. Even when you found out about the app, we knew that too—because you did a search on it.”
I realized something else, another piece slotting into place. “You had it installed on Ben’s phone as well, didn’t you?”
She smiled. “For months. So we knew exactly what he was planning.”
81
“What “was he planning?” I said.
“A renegotiation of our relationship.”
“Meaning what?”
“Two options. One—complete and utter humiliation, admit my guilt, capitulate, and grovel for another chance. Or two—divorce. But not amicable, nothing civilized for the sake of the child. That wasn’t Ben’s way at all.”